Why are hotels so terrible at sales-and why do organizers put up with such onerous 'agreements' with venues?

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Permalink Reply by Darren Edwards - Invisage on November 22, 2009 at 10:14pm

Very interesting question. I find too often too that the legalities and red tape involved when working in some event venues add unnecessary cost to event organisers, service providers and exhibitors. Oh for the good old days when you could just get on with building an exhibition.

I honestly think everyone is so busy trying to protect themselves from litigation that we have all forgotten why we build events.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Hoggatt on November 23, 2009 at 12:30am

I've found that many of the Hotels I've worked in are only concerned with the client before us and the client after us. We're just passing through.

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Permalink Reply by Darren Edwards - Invisage on November 23, 2009 at 12:41am

Recently we had to do about 3 hours work in a venue to build a small trade show display. Had a crew of four people so we would get the job done quickly. Although we have national OHS certification we had to undertake a venue specific induction which took one hour per person.

And our clients wonder why their trade display budget is so high. Our venue and service related costs chew up 25% of most budgets.

Would be interested in any responses from venues on how they find the industry.

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Permalink Reply by Greg Krauska on January 5, 2010 at 2:56pm

Paul, I have done quite a bit of consulting and training for hospitality sales and have found that the professionalism and responsibilities of property salespeople vary widely. Some salespeople are absolutely there to do the very best for customers, while others are "doing sales" until something better comes along. Turnover is a frustrating experience for customers and property GMs alike. And especially in limited service hotels, the salesperson may be wearing 3 or more hats. Not an excuse for them in any way, though it helps to know their world a bit when dealing with them.

You might consider connecting to the national sales team of the hotel chain if your company is big enough. Along with the property-level salesfolk, they have a vested interest in seeing as many rooms full as possible.

Regarding agreements and terms, I would simply negotiate as best you can. When rooms are in high demand for major events, the property clearly has leverage and wants to book the rooms and look to fill the following weeks. If you are booking muliple cities, again, look to the corporate sales team to help leverage multi-city room nights.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Rowney on January 5, 2010 at 3:13pm

Thanks for this. Unfortunately with few exceptions I have found the big hotel groups fail to return my calls even when I send in an RFP (Hilton has perfected this art). National sales teams rarely help as many of the hotels in the group are franchised, over which they have no control.

No they are, in the main a pretty unprofessional bunch, Marriott being better than most.

Most recently having flown from Florida to LA for 4 site visits-only one (a month later) has bothered to follow up my visit with either the further information I asked for or even a courtesy "thank you for coming to see us".

But hell. I'm only trying to spend $40k with them!

Thanks for your time and response, much appreciated.

Paul Rowney

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Permalink Reply by Greg Krauska on January 6, 2010 at 11:35am

I am curious - who really does it well? You mentioned Marriott being a bit better than the crowd. What was the best experience anyone had - and how could that happen more often?

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Permalink Reply by V1ktor on January 15, 2010 at 12:07am

Burbank Airport Marriott and Conference Center - their sales team and banquet team are like family during the time you deal with them. That's one hotel I will go out of my way to recommend due to their extremely good service. They were always there for me. Sure there were few kinks, but nothing major to prevent event.

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Permalink Reply by Howie Ski on January 14, 2010 at 3:27am

If you think that's bad, it's much worse for non-corporate Event holders. I own an Event Production company with an A/V Division (howieskiAV.com) in New Jersey, and those sales people handle non-corporate clients like they are NOBODY. I've seen - on more than one occasion - a salesperson actually MOVE a private Event last-minute to a different (and lesser luxurious) room without even blinking, just so the corporate client before them can hog it up a bit longer!

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Permalink Reply by miriam dema on January 28, 2010 at 5:05pm

Hotels and a few other Venues often have so many contractual limitations that it definitely does seem to make everything harder on the Event Planner.

Working at a Audio, Video and Lighting company we sometimes hear from the event planners we do business that they would have loved to use us on "such and such" event but the hotel made them use an 'in house' vendor that didn't even have the right gear and charged twice as much!

It totally sucks as a planner to know that you could have exactly the gear you needed at the right price instead of something old, tired and in questionable working order just because the hotel has a limited vendor list.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Rowney on January 29, 2010 at 9:27am

Thanks everyone for your comments. My latest experience with a large sporting venue in New York is their demand for huge insurance coverage for our ONE day event-the premium $3000. Yes, and we do have to use their a/v guy, their caterer, and basically fit in with what they want. Funny and I thought we were the client?

How much longer are organizers going to be bossed around by these venues?

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Permalink Reply by Greg Krauska on February 2, 2010 at 12:37am

Why does the industry engage in these kinds of business practices? Is anyone breaking from this mold?

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Permalink Reply by Matto on February 2, 2010 at 10:35am

Similar to what someone else said, I think the greater problem is due to the fact that most hotels don't have dedicated sales staff at the local level for events and even worse, the same people that have to also wear the "sales hat" at the local level get little to no incentive for booking an event. Translation; you wind up working with people that only moderately care if you book at their facility.

Second problem is supply/demand markets, booking events in high demand markets will net very one sided agreements for the organizer, they do that because they can unfortunately. Booking in markets where demand is much less will typically allow you to negotiate much better terms on not only rates, but also for things like bringing in your vendors for certain aspects. However, there's the obvious catch 22 of booking in markets that are in lower demand....the issue of affecting turnout/attendance for your event.

Lastly, it would seem to me that there are enough planners/organizers out there that could create some sort of alliance so you could bring more negotiation power to the table. Perhaps an ultimate objective would be creating a basic terms of agreement with some of the major hotels. The hotels could get more guaranteed business by having a working agreement with an alliance of a large number of organizers/planners, and the organizers/planners would have more favorable terms for their clients. I know something like this doesn't happen overnight...but is interesting enough to at least kick around the idea.

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